Project STRADIVARI represents the culmination of what I hope to accomplish in the coming years. Its contents draw from twenty years of preparation and experience. While I'm uncertain whether it will receive funding, I'm committed to pursuing its components regardless. The scope may expand or contract based on circumstances, but I remain dedicated to the work. I hope you find it engaging to read and perhaps discover something valuable within it.
This project was foreshadowed in earlier blog posts, particularly "The man who planted trees" and many others. These posts are part of a broader initiative I recently submitted for review. I hope the reviewers won't dismiss it as merely incremental science—though I invite readers to form their own judgment after examining the work. I will be adding two additional sections to the posts, not included in the project, which I am currently developing. I am interested in hiring postdocs and Ph.D. students for all aspects of this project. If you're interested, please contact me. While no positions are currently available, I recommend starting early training with GEOframe to improve your candidacy for future opportunities.
Index
- I Objectives
- II AtmosphericBoundary Layer
- III Plant's Hydraulics
- IV Soil Hydrology and Biota
- V Carbon Cycle Integration
- VI Informatics and small language models
- VII - Snow and Permafrost
- VIII - Scale Processes
Scientific Challenge and Innovation
The poetic novel "The Man Who Planted Trees" (Giono, 1953) depicts the transformation of a barren wasteland into an ecosystem with a complex hydrological cycle through decades of tree planting. While inspirational, the story raises unresolved hydrological questions about feedbacks between soil, vegetation, climate, hydrology, and ecosystems, questions current models cannot fully address. Current Earth System Models fail to capture critical feedbacks between soil evolution, plant hydraulics, and atmospheric processes required for understanding coupled hydrological and ecosystem functioning (e.g., Miralles et al., 2025) because Earth's system compartments are often treated as silos or parameterized in crucial aspects of their dynamics. This leaves fundamental questions unanswered: Can the compelling ecosystem transformation depicted in Giono's story be quantitatively validated through dynamic modeling?
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References
From Parameterized to Dynamic Earth System Coupling
Current ESS Models fail to capture critical feedbacks between soil evolution, plant hydraulics, and atmospheric processes required for understanding coupled hydrological and ecosystem functioning (e.g., Miralles et al., 2025) because Earth's system compartments are often treated as silos or heavily parameterized in crucial aspects of their dynamics. This leaves fundamental questions unanswered: Can the compelling ecosystem transformation depicted in Giono's (1953) "The Man Who Planted Trees" be quantitatively validated through dynamic modeling? STRADIVARI aims to fill this knowledge gap by developing an integrated modeling framework that couples dynamic soil-biota interactions, plant hydraulic strategies, and atmospheric boundary layer processes, replacing the fixed BCs that constrain current models with dynamical feedbacks.
The GEOSPACE framework (D'Amato et al., 2025) demonstrates this integration philosophy through operational coupling of soil heat-water transport (WHETGEO) with transpiration processes (Prospero). In that approach, the dynamic root water uptake responds to evolving soil moisture while simultaneously influencing soil energy balance. This proof-of-concept validates that meaningful process coupling emerges from component interactions without sacrificing individual model integrity and represents a blueprint for the project.
The Figure illustrates the complexity of coupled Earth system interactions using Extended Petri Net notation (Bancheri et al., 2019). Even this simplified representation, which misses the feedback with the atmosphere, reveals multiple interdependencies across water, energy, and carbon budgets. The loops represent dynamic feedback, while solid arrows show water, carbon and energy fluxes that must be tracked simultaneously. Traditional models typically fix the quantity inside a triangle as boundary conditions rather than allowing them to evolve dynamically. For a full explanation of the symbols, please see the cited paper.
STRADIVARI aims to fill this knowledge gap by developing an integrated modeling framework that couples dynamic soil-biota interactions, plant hydraulic strategies, and atmospheric boundary layer processes, replacing the fixed boundary conditions that constrain current models with dynamical feedbacks.
Core Innovation: STRADIVARI represents a fundamental methodological paradigm shift: moving from model-constrained science to science-driven modeling. Traditional Earth System modeling forces researchers to adapt scientific questions to existing tool capabilities, while STRADIVARI inverts this relationship by providing computational infrastructure that adapts to scientific inquiry by design. Rather than solving all Earth System coupling challenges directly, STRADIVARI creates tools facilitating the investigation of process interactions, answering the question "what tools do we need to investigate this process?" This paradigm shift transforms Earth system modeling from isolated research efforts into collaborative knowledge construction. Individual researchers are enabled to contribute specialized process knowledge while the modeling infrastructure integrates these contributions into system-level understanding, creating a positive feedback loop where broader participation accelerates discovery across interconnected Earth system processes.
Community Innovation: The GEOframe system technologies, which form the backbone of the project and were designed in anticipation of the FAIR principles of reproducible research and community building, will be extended with AI agents. A domain-specific small language model trained on hydrological literature and extensive GEOframe documentation addresses the fundamental bottleneck by providing accessible interfaces to sophisticated modeling capabilities. This AI assistant will democratize access to complex Earth system modeling by enabling researchers without extensive technical expertise to interact naturally with the modeling framework through conversational interfaces, accelerating scientific discovery and broadening the user community.
References
- Bancheri, Marialaura, Francesco Serafin, and Riccardo Rigon. 2019. "The Representation of Hydrological Dynamical Systems Using Extended Petri Nets (EPN)." Water Resources Research 55(11): 8895-8921. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019wr025099.
- Giono, Jean. 1953. "L'homme qui plantait des arbres." Vogue, Paris.
- Giono, Jean. 2015. The Man Who Planted Trees. New York, NY: Random House.
- Miralles, Diego G., Jordi Vilà-Guerau de Arellano, Tim R. McVicar, and Miguel D. Mahecha. 2025. "Vegetation-Climate Feedbacks across Scales." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1544(1): 27-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15286.
Breakthrough Scientific Objectives and Technical Innovation
The overall project's goal is to avoid setting boundary conditions and build a dynamics system that couples all compartments dynamically with the capability to turn on and off parts of the interactions. This will instantiate through dynamic soil-biota-hydrology coupling extending WHETGEO to 3D with evolving hydraulic properties using population dynamics equations coupled to Richards-Richardson equations (target: demonstrate infiltration changes over 30-year restoration scenarios); plant resilience vs. optimization paradigm testing resilience-based stomatal control through virtual experiments implementing complete Richards-like equations with allometric parameterizations (target: quantify conditions where resilience strategies outperform optimization); surface-atmosphere feedback quantification implementing efficient ABL equations linking plant-level decisions to regional precipitation through LCL dynamics (target: demonstrate precipitation changes from strategic vegetation management); and integrated carbon assessment incorporating proven forest ecosystem models through
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